Aphantasia
There are so many words I favor: Blossom. Perennially. Darkness. Lament. Loneliness. Home.
I use them over and over. Too much, maybe.
I have aphantasia. Literally translated as “no imagination.” This neurodivergent condition means that I have no mind’s eye. I cannot see a thing when I close my eyes, I cannot conjure images in the way most people can. The only thing I’ve ever been able “see” when I close my eyes is a circle, rotating like a kaleidoscope. And even then, I could only bring said image about when I was six years old, desperately seeking reprieve from the waking life that surrounded me.
I can no longer conjure this image.
Recently, upon discovering this condition and relaying it to a friend of 25+ years, I was informed that it makes sense. According to her, I have a profound inability to recall the details of our past. I do not remember faces, outfits, images. Lovers. I only remember feeling.
It is quite a thing to try to describe this condition to others. So, allow me to try.
There are salient experiences in my life, which hang heavy. But they are not visions in the way I understand most people experience memories. They are, rather, words, perhaps? Maybe?
And so, if you are not familiar with aphantasia, let me introduce you to this most perplexing disorder: The house on C Street. The house on Hamilton. The warehouse. The first marriage. The second marriage.
The house on C street: It feels like coldness, like wallpaper displayed in the appropriate colors and textures of its day, the pastels and the glittering silvers… it feels expansive, as if it could go on forever, but not in a deep way. Superficially. The wallpaper touches suits, maybe khakis? Suits or khakis that then bounce to a dive bar where men smoke inside and lament their wives and children and then they eventually die of cancer. When the men die, it feels like a single sheet of paper. Thin.
The house on Hamilton: it is a muted brown—the feeling, not the color— which is sterile. It is the feeling of vaulted ceilings that mimic more soulful architecture. It is the feeling of Americans making attempts at being worldly and falling short, producing all manner of projections as a result. It is the feeling of white working-class people pantomiming abundance. There are pillows with tassels meant to demonstrate status, but it all feels empty, ridiculous even. It feels literally insane—literally—that these tassels exist when priest pedophiles live next door. It feels scary and violent.
The warehouse: it feels like rat shit, if shit can have a feeling. It is comforting, in a way. Natural and euphoric while also being alarming. It is like an all-encompassing bonfire that fills one’s hair with embers, smelling of drunken conversation for days, like the Zephyr train, with its forced connections and weird dinners, traveling from Utah to Nebraska with a secret and sacred smoking hole down below, down the stairs and then back up again, through the classes that are all passed out from drink, and then back up again to the unsuspecting washroom where many a traveler has flicked the ash of a fag, even though it’s a federal offense to do so, and then through the infamous and folklore-ish hole.
The warehouse feels like metal, if that makes sense. It feels like the sun rising and an ornery invitation to not care, to snort cocaine and smoke cigarettes and maybe even smoke cheap ass fake weed, salvia from the early 2000s, brief hallucinations. It feels like 20 years ago. It feels like some kind of commentary on the wrinkles I’ve collected since then, the way my hands now look like encased sausages, both infinite probability and impermanence bursting. I can see them when I look at them, of course. But my hands feels like the arrow of time, now.
The first marriage: the sensation is one of childish and boundless play; his great head of hair, which eventually turned grey, I think, feels wild. He feels like the feeling of unknowability, of something accepting and unique and yet, somehow bound. But I do not “see” him. I feel him smoking a cigarette and the way he always seemed to blow the smoke out of the side of his mouth without inhaling. The way it felt to resent him this. I feel the darkness of the bar in China Town and how the strippers moved their bodies down a plastic plank while the two of us rejoiced.
The second marriage: this one is complicated. He feels scary, sometimes. Sometimes, he feels like home. When I dream—the only time my aphantasia takes a break—I dream that he is kind, which he is, mostly. I dream that he loves me, that he has a house full of hoarded objects. Sometimes, in these dreams wherein I can “see” things, I cradle them, my second husband, in my embrace. I know that they are broken. Sometimes, they are amenable to these emotional displays of intimacy. Sometimes, their other lovers shoo me away. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter to me, that is, that they have other lovers. It feels like the bottom drops out, proverbially speaking, in these rare, dreamy moments when I can see it all in my mind’s eye. It feels like a body that can move without pain.
I dreamed last night, sailing through the ether with Ritalin and sleeping pills saturating the parts of my brain that likely wish I was more considerate, that I was helping my second husband clean out his hoarded home. There were pillars of books and exercise equipment hidden under mountains of laundry. I worried, of course. Because I saw his vulnerability and his brokenness.
Then my mother knocked on his door and he began coughing, choking even. And my mother said, “You fucking asshole, you will wake everyone up with your lungs!”
I awoke, then, and could not place my position. North? South? Was I fifteen years old? Whose house was I in? Then, rooted in the purple light from the main room in my 950-square home, prairie plants growing from seed under red and blue waves, I remembered that I am grown, a mother, a writer, agential.
It is a tricky thing indeed to have “no imagination,” to perennially blossom with the darkness inherent in loneliness, lamenting a lack of
home
in the guts of self, which I cannot see.